The War On Faith - FF - Thomas Jefferson

"The Christian god is a three headed monster, cruel, vengeful, and capricious. If one wishes
to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the
caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and
hypocrites."

"I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature."

"Christianity...(has become) the most perverted system that ever shone on man. ...Rogueries,
absurdities and untruths were perpetrated upon the teachings of Jesus by a large band of
dupes and importers led by Paul, the first great corrupter of the teaching of Jesus."

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which
declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church
and state.
..........Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, January 1, 1802

"Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy
author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word "Jesus Christ,"
so that it should read,"a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our
religion;" the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to
comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and
Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination."

"When we see religion split into so many thousands of sects, and I may say Christianity
itself divided into it's thousands also, who are disputing, anathematizing, and where the
laws permit, burning and torturing one another for abstractions which no one of them
understand, and which are indeed beyond the comprehension of the human mind, into
which of the chambers of this Bedlam would a man wish to thrust himself. The sum of all
religion as expressed by it's best preacher, "fear god and love thy neighbor,' contains
no mystery, needs no explanation - but this wont do. It gives no scope to make dupes;
priests could not live by it."
..........Letter to George Logan, November 12, 1816

"In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in
alliance with the despot ... they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man
into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for
their purpose."
..........To Horatio Spafford, March 17, 1814

"Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the
introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not
advanced an inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one
half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over
the earth."
.........."Notes on Virginia"

"Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely
crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every
opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he
must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear."
..........To Peter Carr, Aug. 10, 1787

"It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic
mysticisms that three are one, and one is three; and yet that the one is not three, and the
three are not one. But this constitutes the craft, the power and the profit of the priests."
..........To John Adams, 1803

"But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before
his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and
perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in
Church and State."
..........To S. Kercheval, 1810

"History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil
government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as
religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose."
..........To Baron von Humboldt, 1813

"On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the
beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing
one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely
beyond the comprehension of the human mind."
..........To Carey, 1816

"But the greatest of all reformers of the depraved religion of his own country, was Jesus of
Nazareth. Abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily
distinguished by its lustre from the dross of his biographers, and as separable from that as
the diamond from the dunghill, we have the outlines of a system of the most sublime
morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man. The establishment of the innocent and
genuine character of this benevolent morality, and the rescuing it from the imputation of
imposture, which has resulted from artificial systems, invented by ultra-Christian sects
(The immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his
miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the
Eucharist, the Trinity; original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of the
Hierarchy, etc.) is a most desirable object."
..........To W. Short, Oct. 31, 1819

"It is not to be understood that I am with him (Jesus Christ) in all his doctrines. I am a
Materialist; he takes the side of Spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentance toward
forgiveness of sin; I require a counterpoise of good works to redeem it. Among the sayings
and discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine
imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others, again, of so
much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism and imposture, as to
pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same
being. I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross; restore him to the former, and leave
the latter to the stupidity of some, the roguery of others of his disciples. Of this band of
dupes and imposters, Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and the first corruptor of the
doctrines of Jesus."
..........To W. Short, 1820

"The office of reformer of the superstitions of a nation, is ever more dangerous. Jesus had to
work on the perilous confines of reason and religion; and a step to the right or left might
place him within the grasp of the priests of the superstition, a bloodthirsty race, as cruel
and remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham, of
Isaac and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel. That Jesus did not mean to impose himself
on mankind as the son of God, physically speaking, I have been convinced by the writings
of men more learned than myself in that lore."
..........To Story, Aug. 4, 1820

"The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of man. But compare with
these the demoralizing dogmas of Calvin.
1. That there are three Gods.
2. That good works, or the love of our neighbor, is nothing.
3. That faith is every thing, and the more incomprehensible the proposition, the more merit
the faith.
4. That reason in religion is of unlawful use.
5. That God, from the beginning, elected certain individuals to be saved, and certain others
to be damned; and that no crimes of the former can damn them; no virtues of the latter
save."
..........To Benjamin Waterhouse, Jun. 26, 1822

"Creeds have been the bane of the Christian church ... made of Christendom a
slaughter-house."
..........To Benjamin Waterhouse, Jun. 26, 1822

"The truth is, that the greatest enemies of the doctrine of Jesus are those, calling themselves
the expositors of them, who have perverted them to the structure of a system of fancy
absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the
day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father,
in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the
brain of Jupiter."
..........To John Adams, Apr. 11, 1823

"The metaphysical insanities of Athanasius, of Loyola, and of Calvin, are, to my
understanding, mere lapses into polytheism, differing from paganism only by being more
unintelligible."
..........To Jared Sparks, 1820